Billy the Kid—a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney—was a horse thief and cattle rustler, portrayed as a charismatic rogue and a cold-blooded killer who gunned down four men on his own and five others with the help of cronies. After the Kid's murderous escape from a New Mexico courthouse on April 28, 1881, Lincoln County's new sheriff Pat Garrett began his pursuit, which ended less than three months later when Garrett gunned down the Kid in the darkened bedroom of his friend Pete Maxwell. They might both have been forgotten had not Garrett, in answer to the controversy surrounding his own actions, eventually published The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid. Western historian Mark Lee Gardner gives us a dual biography of the Kid and Garrett, taking a fresh look at these two men, their relationship, and what they would come to mean to a public enamored of the violent past of the Wild West.